Kern protested, "There's no need to bother. I can see for myselt Things are going fine here." " H ' h " h d . h e sere, s e announce Into t e tiny phone. Within a minute a member of Kern's own generation, Enoch Rei- chardt, appeared, damp with rain and grinning widel They had been boys to- gether, on adjoining farms, but their at- tempts to play together had not been successful. Enoch, a year younger, had brought a softball and bat over to the Kerns' yard-the Reichardts had no yard, all the space between their build- ings was used for equipment and ani- mals-and David, newly a teen-ager and not yet used to his own strength, had hit the ball far over the barn, into the thorns and poison ivy past the dirt road, next to the tumbledown foundation of the old tobacco-drying shed. The road in those days, before it was macadamized and straightened, swung closer to the barn, to the broad dirt entrance ramp, and then dipped downhill to run along the meadow, under the tulip poplar. Though the boys searched for a scratchy; buggy twenty minutes, they never found the ball, and Enoch never came back to play. But toda)T, more than fifty years later, he seemed to bear no grudge, and Kern was happy to see someone nearly as old as he looking so well--stocky and tan, repelling the rain as if waxed. His grin showed straight white teeth. Enoch's teeth had been crooked and brown and must have pained him for years. He asked Kern if he would like to see his fields, how they were being farmed. "It's pretty wet out," Kern said. "I think I get the idea." He had arranged to meet two old classmates, with their spouses, at the Alton Country Club that evening, and was wearing a Burberry, a gray suit, and thin-soled black loafers bought at a Simi Valley mall. Enoch's uncannily white smile broad- ened as he explained, "We'll go in my car. It'll take hardly a minute. There's some new ideas around since you were here last. My car's right outside. David, should I get you an umbrella?" "Don't be silly;" Kern said. "It's just d . 1 " a rIZZ e. "Yes, well. That's the way I look at it," Enoch allowed. His car was a comfort- ing relic-a black Ford sedan, with its chrome painted black. The former play- 76 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 7, 2005 mates slithered in. Not far along, on the edge of the enlarged parking lot, which even in this weather held a dozen cus- tomers' cars and vans, stood the first of the new ideas-a kind of quonset hut of white plastic, upheld by arching ribs. "Remember how we used to grow straw- berries?" Enoch asked. "How could I forget?" Strawberries had been David's 4-H project, a means of making a few hundred dollars a sum- mer toward his eventual college ex- penses. He and his mother had stood along the road selling them, to his in- tense embarrassment. Enoch braked. "Would you like to take a look inside?" David felt he had no choice, though the rain seemed to be intensifYing and his Burberry was rain-resistant rather than rainproof Enoch rougWy; in his proud ex- citement, widened a gap in the white plas- tic, and David peeked in. He saw straw- berry plants up on several narrow troughs, four feet off the ground, so that the berries, ripe in November, hung down into sheer air like cherries, like Christmas ornaments. ' quaponic," Enoch told him. "The plas- tic keeps the wannth in and allows for the solar effect; all the nutrients are trickled in trom a hose. There's no dirt." "N 0 dirt," David numbly repeated. "Remember how the berries would rest on the ground and pick up sand? And the turtles and snails would nibble at them before they could be picked?" ' d how your back would ache trom straddling the row and bending over. The daddy longlegs would climb up " your arms. "N 0 more," Enoch said, pleased that David remembered. "You pick these standing up." ' azing," Kern conceded, climbing back into the car, after checking the edges of his shoe soles for mud. Enoch wore thick yellow boots and a green slicker over denim bib overalls; he was one with the weather. He asked, "Would you like me to drive you over the big field?" "Sure," David said. "If you won't get k " stuc . " I d ' h . k ' 11 k " ont t In we get stuc . I n farming the acres, and in selling to people who drove here and picked the fruits and sweet corn themselves, the Reichardts had laid out little roads, firmed up with spalls to check erosion, between the crops. Development, David thought. They drove, slightly skidding, among reserve lengths of PCP irrigation pipe, and dormant rows of strawberries grown through perforated black plastic, and several prefabricated shacks slapped up for the convenience of the summer trade. When the big field was under his mother's management and lay fallow in clover and wildflowers, David used to mow it through a long August day on their old John Deere tractor, whIch he could drive before he could drive a car. Bought secondhand and painted mule-gray, the machine had crawled over the terrain gendy rocking, dragging behind it the roaring rotary blade in its rusty housing. "Would you like to get out?" Enoch asked. The car had gone as far as It could. David looked down at his shoes, and so- licitously thought of the crease in his suit pants. He had never been a guest at the Alton Country Club before. "Sure," he said. He still owed Enoch that softball. They got out and stood together in the rain. A breeze made it- self felt, at this high point of the hill. From here on a clear day you could see the tips of the tallest buildings in Alton, ten miles awa Today the city hid from sight. As Kern feared, the red earth was as gummy as clay. Transferring his feet from one patch of old-fashioned hay mulch to the next, he watched his steps so carefully that he missed much of Enoch's friendly lecture on crop rota- tion, and on new varieties of corn that didn't take so much nitrogen out of the soil. Soil, Kern thought, looking down. Ancestral soil, and to him it was just mud. He turned his attention upward, to the corner patch of woods that no farmer of these acres, for some reason, had ever bothered to cut, de-stump, and plow. Feeling his listener's attention wan- der, Enoch said, with what seemed a twinkle but might have been raindrops in his evelashes, "Your mother used to .I talk about how someday you might build a house up here." David said, "Well, I may yet." He couldn't resist adding, with a wave over the irrigated and plasticized acres, ' d make all this my front yard."